Judy's 45‑Year Sobriety Journey: From Family Wine to Lifelong Recovery

Wait a minute, first I gotta get off this big screen.

That's too much of me.

There's enough of me as it is.

My name's Judy Ross, I'm an alcoholic.

- Hi Judy. - Hi guys.

I first wanna thank Scott very much

for asking me to come to your meeting and share with you.

And you know, this is the problem with getting older.

I wanna thank our leader whose name eludes me now.

Please tell me his name.

And thank you so much for your share.

Sometimes I forget my own name by the way,

so don't worry about it.

My children and grandchildren.

I will tell you the truth, several years ago

when I wasn't anywhere near this old,

I forgot my own daughter's birthday.

So, you know, that's how things go sometimes.

It happens.

Anyway, I am an alcoholic.

I'm coming up on a birthday in about three weeks.

I'm sober today, 45 years, 11 and three quarters months.

And you know, that's kind of amazing.

It really is kind of amazing.

It never occurred to me that when I was drinking,

it never occurred to me that I would stay sober that long,

but not only stay sober that long,

but be okay with it, you know?

Everything is okay.

And as a matter of fact, things are way better

than they were before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous.

So I will tell you a little bit about what it was like,

what happened, well, what it was like, you know,

as far as I was concerned.

May not be the truth, but it's what I remember.

And what happened and what it's like now.

And like Stan, I came from a nice family.

My parents, by the time my father died,

my parents had been married for over 60 years, I think.

They are both passed away now,

but I come from a very loving, loving family.

I had five older brothers and sisters.

My other two, I'm sorry,

the three oldest have since passed away.

There was a big age difference.

My oldest sister was 19 years older than me.

And, you know, by the time I came along,

she was gone and off to college.

We didn't really get close until I was, you know,

in my thirties.

And there was no alcoholism in my family.

Nobody, okay, so little hint, I'm Jewish.

So, you know, Manischewitz Concord grape

was probably my first drink.

And that's okay because I liked Manischewitz Concord grape.

I liked Mocha and David Concord grape.

I liked Scotch and bourbon too.

So, you know, it really wasn't particular,

but the Concord grape is what we had when I was young

and at services and Passover Seders

and Hanukkah celebrations.

And, you know, we were big wine drinkers,

but nobody in my family ever got drunk until I came along.

And as I got older,

I drank more wine at our Passover Seders and got very drunk.

And I got really drunk for the first time

the night of my high school graduation.

I was 17 years old.

I threw up, I had a blackout

and honestly not much changed after that.

I do not have an interesting drinking story.

You know, I didn't get drunk in Woodland Hills

and come to in Paris, France.

Actually, I got drunk in West LA and came to in West LA.

There really wasn't a whole lot of adventure in my life.

I got married when I was 19.

I had my, my daughter was born when I was 20.

My son was born when I was 25

and the divorce happened when I was around 32.

I really did not like my ex-husband.

We had our first argument during the marriage ceremony

and it didn't get any better after that.

Before he moved out, I used to say after,

because I thought it sounded better.

I thought it made me look better.

But the truth of the matter is before he moved out,

I started actively looking for his replacement.

And where I looked, you know,

I don't know where his replacement actually was,

but where I was looking was in the bars

of West LA and Santa Monica.

I would go to one certain bar that was in Santa Monica.

It's not open, closed about a year and a half

after I got sober.

I think I was supplying it with its income.

But I went there almost every Friday and Saturday night

and I left my children home alone.

My children were 12 and seven

when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous.

And I will tell you that I absolutely do not believe

that a 12 year old girl is anywhere near old enough

to babysit a seven year old boy.

But I went off and left them alone all the time.

If I could afford a babysitter, I hired a babysitter.

But if I couldn't, if the money I had

could only be spent on drinking,

then it was gonna be spent on drinking.

It was not gonna be spent on a babysitter.

Thank God nothing bad ever happened to them.

You know, I would come home drunk with, you know,

Mr., we referred, we ladies refer to him

as Mr. Right Now, you know.

And whoever he was, mercifully, he would be gone by morning.

You know, I don't, I don't, I was not raised that way.

My parents did not raise me that way.

My parents were nice, nice people.

They were very well respected members

of the community, the community at large,

and especially of the Jewish community.

I grew up in Portland, Oregon,

and they were well respected.

They would have been horrified to know how I was living

and how well I was taking care of my children.

My, I called Alcoholics Anonymous on a Sunday afternoon.

The night before, I had been to a Bring Your Own Bottle.

How I went to a Bring Your Own Bottle party was drunk.

You know, I mean, I'd already had my drinks.

I had my own bottle at home first.

And then I showed up with scotch

because scotch was apparently, in my mind,

the sophisticated woman's drink.

And I brought a pint because, you know,

I didn't want you to think I drank too much.

And I finished mine in the first hour

and started in on yours.

And yours that night happened to also be scotch.

So I knew I wasn't gonna get too sick,

but I was going to get sick.

I always got sick.

I cannot tell you how, I threw up all the time,

on a regular basis, almost every morning.

If I had a drink the night before,

I was throwing up the next morning.

When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous,

I had broken blood vessels all over my upper chest

from the effort, the throwing up takes.

They had to be, the guy burned them away.

I don't know how he did it, but it hurt.

But they never came back.

So I, you know, I was drunk and, you know,

I met him and whoever he was followed me home

and whoever he was, you know,

he left in the middle of the night and I, you know,

the next morning when I woke up or came to, you know,

it's really like the big book says, I rarely woke up.

I almost always came to.

I thought about my children that morning

and what kind of situation I had put them in.

Here were these two kids who I loved, by the way.

I loved them then and I love them now.

They're kind of old, they're old now.

I'm 35, but they're in their fifties.

I loved them dearly and I never ever meant

to put them in harm's way.

But you know, almost anything could have happened to us.

The guy could have murdered us,

could have set the house on fire

and nobody would have known.

I had lived in where I was living at the time.

I had been there for a number of years.

My neighbors knew me.

They did not know what was going on behind closed doors.

And they did not know that I was out drinking

two or three nights a week

and leaving these lovely children alone.

But on that Sunday, I called,

well, I thought I called Alcoholics Anonymous.

I guess in a way I did.

I called 26th and Broadway in Santa Monica

and somebody was there and talked to me for a little while.

I don't know if there was a meeting there

that Sunday night or not,

but whoever I was speaking to invited me

to come Monday night.

And so I went to the meeting that Monday night

and I picked up some of the free literature,

including a meeting directory.

And I sat in the back of the room

and I didn't really talk to anybody,

but I took the meeting directory home

and I found a location in that directory

that was on Ohio Avenue near Sepulveda.

And I didn't know it specifically,

but I'd lived in that neighborhood for a number of years

and I knew I could find it.

So there was no need for me to call central office

the next day,

but the number was on the front of the directory, so I did.

I believe everything that has happened to me

from the day I was born till now

has happened exactly the way it's supposed to.

My life, even when I was running it off the rails,

my life has been in perfect order.

And so I called central office the next day

and I was asking about meetings at this location,

although there was no need for me to be doing that.

And the woman I was talking to said,

"No, no, don't go there.

"Come to university synagogue tomorrow night, Tuesday night,

"and ask someone to help you find me

"and everything's gonna be fine."

You know, and she told me a little bit about herself

and told me to come to that meeting.

And I said, "You don't understand.

"I have to finish painting my daughter's bedroom."

Apparently that's what I was doing

when I wasn't getting drunk and going out to look for him.

She said to me,

"Do you wanna paint your daughter's bedroom

"or do you wanna get sober?"

And I got scared.

I thought, "You mean I can't do both?"

So I went to the meeting that next night

and I met a number of people

and I met the woman who had been on the phone with me

and she handed me off to another lady

who was taking me around the room

and introducing me to people and getting me a big book

and doing all those things we do with newcomers.

And I looked up at that time at that meeting,

they had an eight foot replica of the big book on the stage.

I think it was the same eight foot replica

that they used to take to the Southern California convention.

But anyway, there was this giant big book up on the stage.

So I looked up there at it and I looked at this woman

and I looked around the room.

You know, everybody seemed happy to be there.

I did not expect that in "Alcoholics Anonymous."

What I knew about AA was what I had seen

in the movies and on television.

You know, "I'll Cry Tomorrow" and "Playhouse 90"

if anybody is old enough to remember "Playhouse 90."

And they played movies like "I'll Cry Tomorrow"

and "The Days of Wine and Roses," you know.

And those were not happy scenes in those movies.

So I looked around at everyone and I said to the lady,

"Are these people really alcoholics?"

You know, referring to all of you as these people.

Are these people really alcoholics?

And she said, "No, the alcoholics were up on the stage

behind the curtain and at 8.30,

they were gonna let them out."

So I've been waiting, you know,

they never did open that curtain.

And I've been here ever since.

I have not, it's not that there haven't been times

when I've wanted to drink, there certainly have.

The first year and a half or so of my sobriety,

I was just obsessed with drinking, obsessed.

I could think of little else.

And, but as time has gone on,

there are two reasons that I don't drink.

And they're both kind of funny, I guess,

but they're both incredibly true.

One is that if I drank, I would not come back.

I am in awe of people who slip and go out and drink

and come back to Alcoholics Anonymous

with all that humility that they can muster.

I am just in awe of those people.

And I think how very brave that is.

And I always welcome them back

because that's what we should do.

But I wouldn't come back.

If I went out and drank, you would never see me again, ever.

I have too much pride and I'm too egotistical to do that.

You just wouldn't see me again.

It's not that I would go to meetings where nobody knew me.

You would just never see me again.

I would just sort of fade away.

The other reason, and the more important one,

is that there are people

who I do not want to have less time than.

You know what I mean?

You have those people in your life.

You don't have to admit it,

but we know who we are and we know who they are.

But I treat everybody the same.

So I've stayed here and life has gone on, life happens.

And I have learned many things since I've been here.

The first thing, one of my first lessons

was that emotional pain is really just like physical pain.

If you hang in there long enough, eventually it goes away.

When I was about six or eight months sober,

I started dating this other lady's husband.

Other lady's husband's was an old idea

I brought with me into Alcoholics Anonymous.

And it was pretty easy.

He was a member of my group and she never came to meetings.

So it seemed easy, you know?

And every once in a while,

I would confess to the woman who was my sponsor

at the time about it.

And she would tell me to stop and I would say, okay.

And then of course I didn't.

And, you know, it just went on like that for about a year.

And excuse me, when I was about 18 months sober,

after we'd been dating for a year,

he left his wife for me, he left her.

And I don't know about you, but I was impressed.

And my best girlfriend who knew what was going on

the whole time, she was impressed.

And the woman who was my sponsor was not impressed,

but sponsors rarely are.

So he left his wife for me

and we dated one another openly for another year or so.

And then I'm sorry to say he left me

for the woman who asked me if I wanted to get sober

or paint my daughter's bedroom.

It's one of those what goes around,

comes around kind of things, you know?

And I was devastated.

I was absolutely devastated.

By then I had changed sponsors.

I've had two sponsors in my sobriety.

The first one for about a year and a half.

And I've had the second one ever since.

We sat in a meeting one night and she said to me,

you know, I can't take this pain away from you,

but it will go away.

And you know, she was right.

That's the other thing about sponsors.

They're always right.

Not almost always, always.

And, and it did go away eventually.

You know, if you're,

if you're experiencing anything like that right now,

give it two or three months tops, you know,

then it gets easier to bear.

And, oh, Susan's sneezing.

Good night Susan.

And then eventually it just gets better.

And you know, after a while it goes away.

And then the fact of the matter is we do it all over again.

You know, it's not like that was my only relationship

in sobriety or my only relationship

that ended well or badly.

But other things have happened since I've been sober.

You know, I was told when I was new to,

to act like a good mother, feed my children,

feed them, give them, give them dinner, clean the house.

I didn't actually mow the lawn,

but I paid somebody to do it.

And when you go to a meeting,

talk to people and pretend you're in.

How I made friends in AA was by talking to other people

who were new, both men and women,

who were new and saying, how are you?

And then pretending to listen.

It's all acting as if, that's all we do.

We all act as if, we all act better than we feel.

That's all we have to do.

That's the easy way to get along in life.

Just act better than I feel.

How simple is that?

And so I did that and I have made friends over the years.

When I walk into an AA meeting,

people seem happy to see me

because I act most of the time better than I feel.

Several years ago, well, how many years ago was it?

Maybe 15 or 20 years ago.

I had to have hip replacement surgery.

And at the time, before we got around to the surgery,

all anybody knew was that I was in some terrible pain.

God, it hurt.

It hurt a lot.

And it took me forever to get a couple of physicians

to give me an X-ray.

And they found out that the hip and the ball

and the socket or whatever was all just smashed up.

No wonder it hurt.

And during that chronic pain can turn any happy person

into a grouch instantly.

And that was me.

I didn't realize how much of a grouch

until I was in Vons one day buying a couple of things.

And I was standing in line.

I only had three or four items.

I was standing in line and a new cashier came up

and waved me over to her register.

But a young couple from behind saw her open

and rushed up and got into that line and got ahead of me.

Well, you'd have thought that somebody

had set a bomb off under my house.

I read them the riot act and I wasn't silent about it.

I wasn't quiet.

I read them the riot act and I just went off on them

about jumping in line in front of me.

Well, the problem with doing that

is that I had been shopping at that Vons for years.

Everybody there knew me.

They may not have known my name or my history,

but they knew me.

And when I got to the register, I said to the cashier,

"I'm so sorry."

I apologized to her and told her I was in pain.

And I tried to get out to the parking lot

so I could tell that young couple that I was sorry,

but they were long gone.

They had gone.

And I realized that I was never gonna have a chance

to apologize to them.

I don't remember what they looked like

or I didn't know anything about them.

And it occurred to me at that very moment

why we act better than we feel.

We act better than we feel.

Whether the feeling is physical, emotional, mental,

whatever, we act better than we feel

because there may not be an opportunity

to make amends for behaving badly.

There just may not.

And there wasn't in that case.

And so in spite of the fact that the pain continued

until I finally had the surgery, which was a relief,

I can't tell you how much of a relief that was,

I purposely acted, I paid attention to what I was doing.

I paid attention to what my face looked like.

I paid attention to the tone of my voice.

And I just acted better than I felt

because it was absolutely a requirement for me, for my life.

When I got married, when I was 19 years old,

I had finished about a year of college

and I had always wanted to go back.

You know, after we got married,

I worked and helped put him through college.

And then I really didn't have much of a chance.

But after we moved to Los Angeles from Seattle in 1965,

and a few years after that,

I decided I wanted a college degree.

I don't know what the hell I was gonna do with it.

But I wanted a college degree.

And I was working at a job that paid me a bonus

that afforded me to go back to school.

And so I went to, and right at that time,

Mount St. Mary's College, a nice Catholic girls school,

was opening up a weekend college.

You didn't have to be a girl

and you didn't have to be Catholic.

And it was called Weekend College for Working Adults.

And what an opportunity I went.

And it took me a while.

It took me about five years

to finish my last three years of college,

two and a half, three years of college.

But I learned stuff.

I know a little tiny something about art.

You know, I learned that Monet and Manet

are two different people.

I didn't know that.

It was a revelation.

I took a couple of writing classes

and found that I could write and that I'm funny.

I took some history classes.

I learned about presidents of the United States,

the things I didn't know.

I learned some stuff.

I had a wonderful time.

I made some friends and I just had the best time.

And I graduated with a degree.

I have a diploma from college.

I have a bachelor's degree.

And what I did with that bachelor's degree

was quit the job that I had

and started a secretarial service.

That's what every good college graduate should do.

I really didn't do anything with the degree.

I didn't use it.

I didn't need it to get a job or anything like that.

I just wanted it.

All my brothers and sisters had their college degrees

and I wanted one.

And so that made me feel really good.

I discovered through those writing classes

that I took at Mount St. Mary's

and through some sharing that I had done in AA,

although I wasn't being funny on purpose in my talks,

but I found out I'm funny.

And so I went and tried another dream of mine.

One dream was to finish college

and another dream turned out to be

that I wanted to do standup comedy.

And I did that.

How you do that is I did how I did everything else.

I took a class.

You go to school.

It's like finding a sponsor.

I took a class and I found out what to do.

And it turned out that in fact I was funny.

And for several years,

I wish I could remember how old I was.

I guess from like my middle fifties

till about six or seven years ago,

I performed sporadically in little places.

You know, I was never anything big.

It was not the Hollywood Palladium or anything like that,

but they were small comedy theaters.

And it was enough that people left.

What a wonderful feeling it is to be on stage

and make a room full of strangers, strangers.

I mean, every once in a while,

three or four friends would come with me to help support me.

But by and large, it was a room full of strangers,

you know, 40 or 50 people I've never met before.

What a powerful feeling it was to make them laugh.

And it brought such joy to my heart

that it made me want to keep doing it.

I haven't done it in a while.

I don't know if I'll go back to it.

I'm not a, well, there are two problems.

One is, I don't know that it's a problem,

but I am, I am 79.

You know, there aren't too many 79 year old standup comics

going on, you know, America's Got Talent.

And the other thing is that Alzheimer's

seems to be going in my family.

The next oldest sister to me is four years older than I am.

And she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

And then I have another brother

who's about 12 years older than me.

We're the only three left.

And he apparently has come, been diagnosed with it as well.

So going on stage and remembering, you know,

10 or 15 minutes worth of material

might not be the easiest thing for me anymore.

Although it's material I've been doing

over and over and over for so long,

I, you know, know it fairly well,

but I don't know that I'm going to do that again.

Meanwhile, I'm here in Alcoholics Anonymous.

And I, you know, my time is almost up.

I know that.

I want to share something about my,

about the ninth step, you know, making amends.

I went for years before I actually made.

The amends I really needed to make were to my ex-husband.

And I let that go and let it go and let it go.

I did it with my first sponsor.

When I was about eight months sober, she said,

"Well, let's write him a letter and, you know,

tell him you're sorry, and do you know where he,"

and I didn't know where he was living.

So I mailed it off to his best friend.

And, you know, basically this letter said,

"I'm in AA now and we're supposed to apologize

for things we've done that are not very nice.

And so I'm sorry and, you know, goodbye."

Basically with that much illness and heart and, excuse me,

and all these years went by,

and by when I was 18 or 19 years sober,

my sponsor was getting some of her babies together

to go through the big book and do the steps

in a different way.

And she asked me if I wanted to join in,

and I said, "Sure, but I'm not making amends to that.

The letters A-H apply."

And she said, "Don't worry.

The steps are written in order just for people like you."

So we got to the first, you know, 19 years sober.

And by this time I had been sponsoring women.

I had been, read the big book several times.

I had been secretary of several meetings.

I was speaking.

You know, I was not saying no, saying yes

to all the AA requests, participating in sobriety,

participating in my group stuff.

So, you know, we go through the big book.

We do all the steps.

We do the inventory.

And basically he was,

there were some people on my eight-step list.

You know, the problem with staying sober a long time

is that although you've made amends

to all the people from your past, now there's new people.

And mostly they're all in your AA group.

You know, all the people I needed to make amends to

were in my group.

But they were easy amends and it was fine.

And I didn't owe any money to anybody.

But then we came to my ex-husband and she said,

"You have to make amends to him."

And I said, "Oh, no, no, no, no."

What he did was awful.

It involved my children and it involved money

and it involved some dignity.

And she said, "Okay."

She said, "You don't actually have to forgive him.

Just pretend like you're forgiving him."

And the interesting thing is that right then I forgot

about all the times I had been pretending about stuff.

Acting as if when talking to a newcomer

and making a friend, you know?

Acting as if pretending I'm a good driver

when I'm on the freeway, you know?

All those things.

Acting as though I'm not in terrible pain

and I should treat you well.

Acting as if I forgot about all that stuff.

I forgot about what happens when I do that.

What happens when I do that is eventually I start to feel

the way I'm acting, I'm pretending to be.

So I tried to figure out how, you know,

a normal person would be forgiving.

And I observed how people in AA behaved

and I observed how people outside of AA behaved.

And I started to emulate them.

And at the time my ex-husband was...

I enjoy this part of the story a little bit.

He was being a guest of the federal government at Lompoc.

He had been a bad boy.

And so I had to write him a letter.

He did not want to see me in person.

And so I wrote him a letter.

And as soon as my sponsor took out the, you know,

justifications and all that stuff,

it was a pretty good letter.

I still have it.

I give it to the women I sponsor

who are having trouble writing an immense letter.

And I mailed it off to him.

And I didn't hear anything.

My children told me he got it, but I didn't hear anything.

And then a couple of years later, he was out.

He had done his time and he had been released.

And my son was having a 30th birthday party.

My son and his first wife lived in Simi Valley.

And the street they lived on was always filled

with children and dogs and cars and people.

I mean, it was just full of family stuff.

And what was interesting was that on this day,

when I arrived from this party, I parked my car.

There was nobody on the street, nobody, no dogs, no cats,

no children.

And I got out of my car

and started to take some things out of the trunk.

I had a couple of gifts and I brought some food

and you know, like you do for your kids.

And my ex-husband came walking out of the house

and saw me with all this stuff.

And he came across the street and asked if he could help me.

And I said, yes.

And then I said, did you get my letter?

And he said, yes.

And I said that all important phrase, is there anything else

I need to do to make this right between us?

And he said, no, we're fine.

And we had a hug and a little kiss on the cheek

and it was over.

That resentment, it was a terrible resentment

that I had been carrying for over 20 years,

was gone in an instant.

And had I known it was that easy,

I'd had done it when I was six months sober.

I don't know why I waited,

except I carried it around on my shoulder

like some kind of badge of honor.

You know, it's good to have a resentment,

helps you wake up in the morning,

gives you like a good cup of coffee, you know.

And now, you know, I don't, it's not that I dislike him.

I just, I don't care anymore.

It's all gone.

I'm better.

The world is better, you know.

The world is better for me not having a resentment.

The world is better when I act well.

The world is better when I just am one among all of you.

You know, I don't need to, I don't need to do anything.

I just need to be.

And I'm, again, I want to thank Scott for asking me

to come here.

Thank you for letting me do this on Zoom.

I'm terrified of going to an in-person meeting.

I haven't gotten sick, knock wood,

'cause I don't go anywhere.

But I'm so glad to be here with you

and thank you so much for listening.